Painting Bold Promises at CBS With Bright Morning Colors

“The news is back in morning news” is the promise splashed across promos for “CBS This Morning,” but on CBS this Monday morning it was hard to find.

Charlie Rose, a host of the newly rejiggered CBS morning show, did ask Julianna Margulies, the star of the CBS drama “The Good Wife,” if she was interested in politics, so maybe that counts as news. His co-host Gayle King announced that Beyoncé had given birth to a baby girl; she asked the musician Melissa Etheridge about her views on the success of the retro-soul singer Adele.

There was also a lot of roundtable discussion of ageism in Hollywood; the 30th birthday of Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge; and a lengthy profile of Dick Van Dyke, 86, because he was briefly a host of the CBS morning show back in 1955, when Walter Cronkite was the program’s news anchor.

In short, the second hour of “CBS This Morning” looked a lot like the second, third and fourth hours of “Today” on NBC.

It was harder to know what to make of the first hour, which was anchored by Mr. Rose and Erica Hill, one of the few holdovers from the last iteration of “The Early Show.” They did address, competently but without noticeable depth or flair, the Republican primary race, the flu, college football, Representative Gabrielle Giffords and a woman who survived a bad bungee jump in South Africa. They also talked to the CBS anchor Scott Pelley, who came on to discuss a “60 Minutes” investigation into stem-cell fraud that was broadcast on Sunday.

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Charlie Rose during the Monday debut of “CBS This Morning,” which is promising more news and less celebrity.Credit
CBS News

Even Mr. Rose’s conversation with Newt Gingrich via satellite didn’t produce much besides a dose of flattery for Mr. Rose. Mr. Gingrich said that he entered the race with a “purely ideas-oriented campaign, almost a Charlie Rose-style campaign.”

First shows are always tough, and especially in this case allowances have to be made for shock: seeing Mr. Rose outside his usual lugubrious, black-swathed studio and on a brightly lighted morning show set is a little like seeing a polar bear on South Beach — a familiar species in the wrong habitat. Mr. Rose, who has not quit his night job at PBS, was already a CBS News contributor; he also worked there full time from 1984 to 1990, but even back then he was a night owl, the host of “CBS News Nightwatch.”

Ms. King, wearing her lucky color, bright yellow, and her customary daytime exuberance, gushed over celebrities in a way that didn’t suit the show’s hard-news mission. (“This is what’s so cool about you, Melissa,” she told Ms. Etheridge.) Perhaps mercifully, she and Mr. Rose did not interact very much.

None of the anchors particularly matched the mood of the show’s flashy new set, which seems designed to look like a downtown loft or an uptown law firm hoping to look hip: lots of glass walls and bookshelves lining an exposed brick backdrop.

The first day is certainly not enough to judge whether this redo will improve on the old “Early Show,” let alone predict whether it can do better against “Today” on NBC and “Good Morning America” on ABC. But there is a logic behind the changes.

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Gayle King, one of the hosts “CBS This Morning,” with Mr. Rose and Erica Hill.Credit
CBSNews.com

Since Mr. Pelley took over “CBS Evening News,” that program has increased its audience by cutting back on fluff, though it’s still in third place. Mr. Pelley is not as appealing an anchor as his rivals Brian Williams or Diane Sawyer, but his newscast has more economic and foreign news and fewer silly features.

The plan to stop competing for celebrity guests on the morning show and to double down on hard news made so much sense that “The Early Show” began moving in that direction last year; it just wasn’t much in evidence on Monday. The maiden broadcast didn’t even shed light on what the network was thinking when it went outside its own stable of journalists and picked Mr. Rose and Ms. King to restore the luster of CBS News in its heyday.

The network hired Chris Licht, the producer who helped make “Morning Joe” on MSNBC a hit, to refashion “CBS This Morning.” Yet any resemblance to that lively cable talk show about politics was wiped out by CBS’s choice of casting. Current MSNBC promos playfully contrast the co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, framing them almost as characters from “Guys and Dolls” (albeit a Sgt. Sarah Brown in running shorts).

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There wasn’t much chemistry on the CBS set, where for most of the show the hosts sat at arm’s length around a huge, circular glass table and didn’t really converse, let alone banter. Pinned between the two new stars, Ms. Hill had the forced cheer of a hostage in “Key Largo.”

Mr. Rose has had a long, much vaunted career, but his strength isn’t reading cue cards or teleprompters, nor is he known for witty badinage. He is good at talking to important people, asking long, considered questions that sometimes elicit sharp answers, the kind of interviews that network news rarely has time for. Ms. King is an energetic, likable television personality who for some reason people don’t want to watch much on television.

With stars like that, CBS morning news really should focus on the news. And that may yet happen when the show stops clearing its throat and finds its voice.

A version of this article appears in print on January 10, 2012, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Painting Bold Promises at CBS With Bright Morning Colors. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe